Sunday, June 24, 2012

Happy Chinese New Years!

Dear Family, I am sooooooooooooo grateful to be in my new area!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Sister Emily Jean Fitzpatrick is AMAZING!!! She is such a competent missionary and it is really a joy to serve with her. We laugh every day and do our best every day to help build the Kingdom. I am especially grateful for the support our wards give us. Our two ward correlators are great!!! We have been able to meet with both R.S. presidents as well. Their help has been invaluable to our planning this week. My awesome companion also has this HUGE list of part member families--we have visited or at least attempted to visit one part member family a day. It has been a great way to find meaningful lessons. We have also found tracting to be pretty awesome---we met a super great family on Sunday. They wanted us to stay and have dinner with them, but we already had an appointment for dinner at our recent convert's house. Man, Guo nian is pretty crazy with the dinner appointments. We've already had two two dinner nights!!! We didn't plan it that way either. Just as it happened we'd just eaten dinner and found out the next appointment was for dinner too. So funny!!! Lol, we have eaten pigs blood chunks, chicken feet, and thousand year old eggs. Something that is kind of fun is that Sister Fitzpatrick and I put together some hongbao's (red envelopes traditionally stuffed with money which are given out to children at this time) to give as a present at our dinner appointments. It is a little kit on how to give a meaningful member referral. We have a section of Elder Ballard's conference talk from April Conference (emphasising the importance of member involvement in missionary work), a sheet from our zone leaders giving the members three steps to a member referral (1 = pick some names to pray over; 2 = pick if they want us to give a material, eat dinner, meet at the church, etc; 3 = a date where we can follow up with them to see if they have set up with their friend yet.), and a blank contact slip. It has been pretty fun to give out to the members we have met this week. We have faith that through this activity the members will become more bold with missionary work and that we will find new people to teach. We are excited to see how it turns out! For gospel study, I had some awesome experiences with the Book of Mormon this week. Since I have been spending most of my time reading Jesus the Christ and the New Testament lately, I've sometimes forgotten to read my Book of Mormon daily. But this week I was like, no, I need to read the Book of Mormon--and I found answers for our investigators almost immediately! It was pretty awesome. It has been an awesome week. We have soo many funny stories together already...too tired to type them all up at the moment though....sooo tired because of all this food! Lol. Well, I love you all so much!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! --------Love Sister Smith -----Sister B. Smith